Don't get me wrong, I'm sure that I can make this mbp work for me for at least the next year or two, but it will require some workarounds like pre-rendering etc and when an m1 or m2 Mac pro gets released, I will probably give it some serious consideration.
But anyway, for all I know the mbp may be on par with the baseline Mac pro, but especially since the m1 computers are incompatible with an egpu, it feels like a bit of a low ceiling, or even if not that low of a ceiling, a ceiling nonetheless. Haven't had the time to troubleshoot those, so maybe it's not a problem with the computer itself. Real time playback issues with uhd prores 4444 whereas I get perfect playback with 6k r3d. A feature that take 3 hours to render one day suddenly takes 6 hours the next. I've also encountered some unreliability/inconsistency in render times that I don't yet understand, but never experienced with my old set up. No doubt there are significant improvements (in particular I'm noticing then with noise reduction, h265 rendering, raw decoding), but where cpu was my bottleneck before it seems like gpu is now the bottleneck. To be honest I'm a little disappointed with the performance improvements I'm seeing. In the last couple of weeks I switched from using a 2017 iMac with a Radeon vii in an egpu over to a 16" 2021 mbp with m1 Max. And it's massively reduced the processing overhead required to have a smooth and pleasant grading experience - which is the main thing that's opened my eyes to the possibility of using a laptop instead of a desktop for grading work.īut I was wondering who's been working with Macbooks in Resolve, and if anyone can speak to the viability/advantages/appeal of the M1 Max compared to an intel Macbook with a beefy eGPU? I only recently discovered the workflow elegance of using "Render In Place" to remove the pain of noise-reduction processing from my GPU's/CPU's workload while grading. I've also been hearing nothing but rave reviews of the newer M1 Max machines, and with their dedicated Prores/h264 encoders/decoders, it seems like they can give even a machine with a powerful eGPU a run for its money (and beat it in lots of areas too). And paired with a powerful eGPU (and even without) it seems to work very nicely in Resolve.
I recently picked up the last of the Intel Macbook Pros for a series I was working on over in the Middle East (the 16" with the powerful 5600M GPU), and it's very capable - with a healthy processing advantage over the old 12-core 5,1 Mac Pros I used to use, and almost equivalent to the base 8-core 7,1 Mac Pro (in Geekbench CPU benchmarks at least). And I'm wondering what people think the state of play is at the moment? I'm pondering the possibilities of using a Macbook for grading work at the moment (something that seemed pretty unfathomable to me until about 2 years ago).